Saturday, February 25, 2012

In honor of tomorrow's big show, here's a couple big Oscar-related lists for the day. First, I've ranked all 76 of the Best Picture winners I've seen:

1. Casablanca

2. Annie Hall

3. Sunrise

4. All About Eve

5. An American in Paris

6. Gone With the Wind

7. My Fair Lady

8. Unforgiven

9. The Godfather Part II

10. Lawrence of Arabia

11. Amadeus

12. On the Waterfront

13. The French Connection

14. The Godfather

15. It Happened One Night

16. The Best Years of Our Lives

17. Rebecca

18. All Quiet on the Western Front

19. The Apartment

20. How Green Was My Valley

21. The English Patient

22. The Departed

23. West Side Story

24. Patton

25. Wings

26. Gigi

27. The Sting

28. No Country for Old Men

29. Going My Way

30. Out of Africa

31. Mutiny on the Bounty

32. Hamlet

33. Midnight Cowboy

34. The Bridge on the River Kwai

35. The Silence of the Lambs

36. Platoon

37. The Return of the King

38. The Last Emperor

39. Schindler's List

40. The Deer Hunter

41. All the King's Men

42. Rocky

43. The Hurt Locker

44. Titanic

45. Marty

46. Ordinary People

47. Ben-Hur

48. You Can't Take It With You

49. In the Heat of the Night

50. Slumdog Millionaire

51. Terms of Endearment

52. Shakespeare in Love

53. Braveheart

54. The Broadway Melody

55. Oliver!

56. Grand Hotel

57. Dances with Wolves

58. A Man for All Seasons

59. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

60. The King's Speech

61. Kramer vs. Kramer

62. American Beauty

63. Gandhi

64. The Lost Weekend

65. Cimarron

66. Forrest Gump

67. Million Dollar Baby

68. Chariots of Fire

69. The Sound of Music

70. Rain Man

71. Gladiator

72. Cavalcade

73. A Beautiful Mind

74. Gentlemen's Agreement

75. Driving Miss Daisy

76. Crash

The seven winners I haven't seen yet are: The Great Ziegfeld, The Life of Emile Zola

Mrs. Miniver, The Greatest Show on Earth, Around the World in 80 Days, Tom Jones, and Chicago.

Second, a list of all the actual winners in chronological order, followed in parentheses by the actual nominee I would have picked (limited of course by the films I've seen) and my personal choice as Best Picture. I'm following as best I can the Oscar eligibility rules for Hollywood films (foreign film release dates are too complicated, so for the sake of this exercise, let's just assume that films have been released simultaneously in all parts of the world).

Looking at this list, it's reassuring how many great movies have been nominated for Best Picture, even if the eventual winners were lackluster. 18 times my favorite of the year was one of the nominees, with my favorite winning six times (Sunrise, Casablanca, All About Eve, An American in Paris,Annie Hall and Unforgiven). If The Tree of Life pulls off a huge upset tomorrow, it'll be the seventh.

27/28: Sunrise/Wings (Sunrise, Sunrise)

28/29: The Broadway Melody (The Broadway Melody, The Docks of New York)

29/30: All Quiet on the Western Front (All Quiet on the Western Front, The Man with a Movie Camera)

30/31: Cimarron (The Front Page, City Lights)

31/32: Grand Hotel (Shanghai Express, Trouble in Paradise)

32/33: Cavalcade (42nd Street, Duck Soup)

1934: It Happened One Night (The Thin Man, L'Atalante)

1935: Mutiny on the Bounty (Top Hat, Top Hat)

1936: The Great Ziegfeld (Dodsworth, Swing Time)

1937: The Life of Emile Zola (The Awful Truth, Make Way For Tomorrow)

1938: You Can't Take It with You (The Adventures of Robin Hood, Bringing Up Baby)

1939: Gone with the Wind (Stagecoach, The Rules of the Game)

1940: Rebecca (The Philadelphia Story, The Shop Around the Corner)

1941: How Green Was My Valley (Citizen Kane, Citizen Kane)

1942: Mrs. Miniver (The Magnificent Ambersons, Cat People)

1943: Casablanca (Casablanca, Casablanca)

1944: Going My Way (Double Indemnity, A Canterbury Tale)

1945: The Lost Weekend (The Bells of St. Mary's, Children of Paradise)

1946: The Best Years of Our Lives (It's a Wonderful Life, The Big Sleep)

1947: Gentlemen's Agreement (Crossfire, Black Narcissus)

1948: Hamlet (The Red Shoes, The Red Shoes)

1949: All the King's Men (A Letter to Three Wives, The Third Man)

1950: All About Eve (All About Eve, All About Eve)

1951: An American in Paris (An American in Paris, An American in Paris)

1952: The Greatest Show on Earth (The Quiet Man, Singin' in the Rain)

1953: From Here to Eternity (Roman Holiday, Ugetsu)

1954: On the Waterfront (On the Waterfront, Seven Samurai)

1955: Marty (Mister Roberts, Night of the Hunter)

1956: Around the World in 80 Days (The Ten Commandments, The Searchers)

1957: The Bridge on the River Kwai (Witness for the Prosecution, Funny Face)

1958: Gigi (Gigi, Vertigo)

1959: Ben-Hur (Anatomy of a Murder, North by Northwest)

1960: The Apartment (The Apartment, Psycho)

1961: West Side Story (West Side Story, A Woman is a Woman)

1962: Lawrence of Arabia (Lawrence of Arabia, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance)

1963: Tom Jones (How the West Was Won, The Birds)

1964: My Fair Lady (Dr. Strangelove, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg)

1965: The Sound of Music (Dr. Zhivago, Pierrot le fou)

1966: A Man for All Seasons (A Man for All Seasons, Au hasard Balthazar)

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

I really enjoyed this and I'm not sure why it doesn't seem to be as popular as it should. I fear it's because Tintin isn't a typical Hollywood hero in that he doesn't have some kind of psychological crisis he overcomes through his adventure. Capt. Haddock has his addiction arc, but not a whole lot of melodrama is wrung out of that, and Tintin's relation to it is simple disapproval. Tintin doesn't have a "character" that "develops" in the way we're used to seeing, even kids' movies invariably have some lame redemption or parental anxiety story grafted onto them.

This is, I think, why it hearkens back to the first Indiana Jones film as much as in Spielberg's brilliantly designed action set pieces. Raiders of the Lost Ark doesn't have character to speak of: Indiana Jones and Marion are types out of 40s Hollywood (the first a combination of Bogart and Flynn, the second a classic Hawksian woman) and their rudimentary romance merely serves to break up the action sequences. They don't develop, they are entertainment devices that are run through a plot in the manner of classic serials and adventure films.

This, then, is the truly old fashioned Spielberg film of 2011, not the thoroughly modernist War Horse. The two films make an interesting pair, as inevitably happens when Spielberg releases two films in the same year, always opposing versions of himself (Schindler's List and Jurassic Park in 1993, Munich and War of the Worlds in 2005, Minority Report and Catch Me If You Can in 2002, Amistad and The Lost World in 1997, Always and The Last Crusade in 1989). In almost every one of those years, I prefer the Genre Spielberg to the Prestige Spielberg. 2005 is pretty close: both Munich and WotW are very good movies with really awful scenes near the end. War Horse has more greatness in it (the last hour or so), but also more terribleness (the first hour or so). Tintin is consistently good throughout, but it feels like it's missing something.

It's the work of a master, with beautifully conceived and executed action sequences and it is always entertaining. Formally, the film is a wonder, not just in managing to (barely) overcome the inherent uncanny valley issues of its medium. Spielberg creates some of the most clever and beautiful dissolves seen in years, and there's a visual motif of reflective surfaces (mirrors, glass, water, etc) that is unmatched in any animation I've seen. To what end I'm not sure: why is Tintin hounded by so many distortions of reality? Is it merely because it looks really cool? I think so, and that gets to what I think the film is missing. It's a well-told story that is all surface; it lacks the inspiration, the edge, the danger of genius. It's a more accomplished film than something like Gore Verbinski's Pirates of the Carribean films, but I prefer the crazy energy of those films, the willingness to go completely off the rails to risk making a great movie. War Horse comes close to that, Tintin plays it safe.